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Google Businesses Technology

Google Employees Are Free To Speak Up. Except on Antitrust. (nytimes.com) 45

Posted by msmash from the off-limits dept.
Google employees are not shy about speaking up. In the last few years, they have openly confronted the company about building a censored search engine in China, the handling of sexual harassment claims and its work with the Pentagon on artificial intelligence technology for weapons. But there is one subject that employees avoid at all costs: antitrust. The New York Times: They don't address it in emails. They don't bring it up in big company meetings. They are regularly reminded that Google doesn't "crush," "kill," "hurt" or "block" the competition. And if you hope to land an executive job at the internet company, do not bring up the A-word in the interview process. As the Justice Department, a coalition of state attorneys general and a congressional subcommittee have investigated Google for monopoly behavior over the last year, there has been little discussion internally about antitrust concerns. Now, as the department prepares to file a lawsuit against the company, the usual forums where Google employees debate anything and everything have been startlingly subdued about what may be an existential threat to it. That's because Google's leaders have made it clear that antitrust is not a topic to be trifled with.
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Google Employees Are Free To Speak Up. Except on Antitrust. More

Google Employees Are Free To Speak Up. Except on Antitrust.

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  • Google is turning out to be such a pita. Just a reflection on the questionable corp leadership.

    • If there were internal discussions of antitrust, those discussions could be subpoenaed and turn against the company.

      Standard policy at many companies is that legal matters are not discussed without a lawyer present and a clear justification for the conversation being privileged.

      • How do you enforce this? It makes sense for actual pending litigation or where there may reasonably be expected to be litigation, but most business decisions have potential legal consequences and not every one of them can be made with corporate counsel present or some 4-D chess consideration of what he legal issues are.

        • I really can't imagine how Google could do it, Imagine, though, that you could find a company which had a huge amount of surveillance technology designed to see what everyone was doing on the web. Imagine the company also had a huge amount of data centre technology where they could gather it all together. Now imagine that same company also had search technology.

          What I'd do if I was that company is first explicitly order my employees to only discuss anti-trust issues with the corporate lawyers. Then I'd

          • Then I'd spy on all my employees, dump it all into a big datastore and then search that datastore for any sign of discussion of anti-trust issues. If I found that, I'd give them a disciplinary firing on the spot.

            I would do the same as you.

            Except, I wouldn't tell them the reason they're being fired, I'd just make something up, or I'd simply use my surveillance capabilities to find something they're already doing badly to use that as an excuse.

            • Don't forget to purge all records of the event, just in case the rest of your shenanigans aren't quite enough for a slam-dunk obstruction of justice conviction.

        • How do you enforce this?

          For verbal conversations, you can't. But that isn't the main problem. Verbal conversations, especially one-on-one, are often inadmissible as hearsay.

          For written conversations, you can automatically grep for bad words on the company email server.

          But the best defense is education. Make sure your workforce understands the issues. Make sure they understand the consequences of violations.

          These are issues that American companies deal with all the time.

        • training. Where I used to work we received training around language. Like the above using language like kill, crush, destroy, bury the competition was strictly a no-no be that in writing or in conversation. staff were all also trained that the ONLY way to discuss legal matters was with a lawyer present or in direct communication with a lawyer. We had training on this every year. Enforcement was simply education of "do you really want to be the person called to court to try and justify what you said/wrote?"

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by rtb61 ( 674572 )

        What are you nuts, of course you dicuss any pending legal liabilities for the corporation. They impact you future income, you might be legally liable, you might be set up to be legally liable, how dangerous is it. Of course you discuss it, you would be insane not to and just as silly to not demand answer from the corporation.

        I bet you the slimey little Googlites never discuss the quality of the advertisements they show and how much continuously promoting those product in a targeted fashion impacts climate c

    • At least they can go to bed at night knowing they're not Facebook

    • Sergei is relatively decent but Page and Schmidt are both hypocritical dicks.

  • James Damore (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Kaenneth ( 82978 ) on Tuesday October 13, 2020 @02:34PM (#60603870) Journal

    Don't talk about diversity policies either...

    • Google has a mob problem. They indiscriminately hired tens of thousands of spoiled brats, and now what their policy is doesnt matter. James Damore, who you bring up, was literally following not only company policy but also fulfilling a company requests for comment, on the forum they wanted those comments.

      The mob decided that the policy, and company requests, did not matter. The mob decided that James Damore had to go. Google isnt in control.

      • Re:James Damore (Score:5, Interesting)

        by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Tuesday October 13, 2020 @03:27PM (#60604118)

        Google has a mob problem.

        They created this problem themselves.

        In the early days, there were all-hands meetings every Friday where employees could directly address Larry and Sergey and ask them anything. This created an open and friendly atmosphere, but it didn't scale well and now they have a culture where the guy in the 223rd cubicle feels justified in sticking his nose into top-level policy decisions.

        They no longer have the weekly meetings.

        • They no longer have the weekly meetings.

          Well, they're no longer weekly. They are monthly, more or less.

      • Isn't that the dirty secret of any organization? That control of it is a shared illusion by everyone who allows themselves to be controlled?

        Only authoritarians like Trump have the illusion that being in charge magically makes an organization do everything that the organization/leadership wants.

        Google's larger problem is that they'd like to be fully immersed in all the expected capitalist corporate behavior but is held back from time to time by a mass of employees who want to enforce some other standard of

  • Advise of Counsel? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by nealric ( 3647765 ) on Tuesday October 13, 2020 @02:38PM (#60603892)

    Wouldn't surprise me if they were advised by their antitrust lawyers to not allow discussion of the topic. Internal communications about antitrust could possibly be subject to discovery and used against the company, even if they were made out of ignorance or with good intentions

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by bws111 ( 1216812 )

      Exactly this. I don't know why anybody would be surprised by this. I can't imagine any company being dumb enough to allow discussion of pending legal action.

      • Exactly this. I don't know why anybody would be surprised by this. I can't imagine any company being dumb enough to allow discussion of pending legal action.

        Yep. This isn't particular to Google, or to antitrust. Any company that has or is likely to have some legal action is foolish if they don't shut down employee discussion of the topic, particular in any form that is available for discovery. And with respect to antitrust, it's basically a given that any company that gets as large as Google is will be investigated for antitrust action, regardless of what it does or doesn't do.

        Even if no employee ever says anything that can be used against the company (good l

    • Precisely. The best way to avoid having your words used against you is to avoid uttering any words to begin with. Microsoft was full of emails discussing how they would behave toward their customers and competitors and it only hurt them.

  • Google Employees Are Free To Speak Up. Except on Antitrust.

    Granted, it wasn't a great film [wikipedia.org] but not talking about won't make it go away...

  • or maybe Alta Vista.

  • And if you hope to land an executive job at the internet company, do not bring up the A-word in the interview process.

    For my friend that hates vegetables, that would be, "Arugula". Hard to see that coming up in a Google interview, but okay I'll tell him.

  • Not the only subject that can't be broached. (Score:3)

    by Lordpidey ( 942444 ) on Tuesday October 13, 2020 @02:47PM (#60603948) Homepage

    Damore's situation has made it quite clear that bringing up any anti-male bias, or bringing statistics to any gender/diversity related issue is also forbidden.

  • every company restricts what employees can say about sensitive legal matters. This is nothing new. Hasn't anyone ever worked for a large company before?

  • Did anyone ever try to get a promotion at Google by identifying as their boss?

  • Hey everyone at Google, fight the power! Stand up for what's right! Take on the system!
    You've been doing it for all these social justice concepts, do it now!
    Oh, wait...this has actual consequences, and if you get fired for it, you won't look so cool.
    Nevermind.

  • Those with conservative or even a lot of mainstream views would like to have a word with you, but they won't. They don't dare, they know it's career suicide to voice any opinion that isn't liberal or woke (and a touch of libertarian) at Google. Big tech is simply that intolerant of conservatives, and Google is the worst of the bunch.

    I've talked to way too many gay people that have told me it was far easier to come out as gay than it was for them to come out as conservative. People are more afraid of big tec

    • Of course Google is a monopoly, of course they have abused their monopoly. They have been blatantly abusing their monopoly to swing the 2020 election against Trump and they know their guilty as hell. The CEO of Google is on video saying that they were going to do exactly that, and their actions have certainly reinforced this. Even if you don't like Trump this should worry you, as they will do the same thing in the next election and you may not like the candidates that Google picks for your leaders.

      So? I didn't like the candidates that the Koch brothers picked either. Hello, meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Oh wait, the surviving politically active Koch brother is still selecting candidates. Meet the new boss, same as the current boss. Now you have two bosses.

      I have bad news for you. This new Trump Supreme Court will vociferously defend the right of Google to "abuse their monopoly to swing the election" because they have already done so for their own team. Citizens United v. FEC stands,

      • The new judge will treat Big Tech the way the Supreme Court has treated monopolies for well over a century. Use RAND to ensure that they supply the same service to all on equal terms as a utility. She will also want to ensure the carefully crafted balance of power that the constitution created. Big Tech is buying their way around that balance of power and I don't think the Supreme Court will allow that to happen unabated.

        Using Citizens United to justify abusing a monopoly is pretty flimsy. Personally I'm of

  • it is very easy to ignore something when your job depends on ignoring said something

  • How ironic that a company that claims to take issue with communist regimes has no problem copying their methodologies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

  • -get the fuck to work.

    are they really being paid to dick around shoot the shit?

    i don't understand company culture these days. and yeah despite notions of "retaining talent", you lock shit down and pay the same money, you're gonna get as good or better people than the blabbermouth dipshits currently working there.

  • When I point out that if you're being interviewed for a job in Google's legal department, bringing up the "A word" might be exactly what's called for?

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